I think that the goal of the course is to learn the students to interact with "western" people, not to do something with Bitcoin (although they should be able to find out for themselves that there are possibilities for that also and they would be better able to judge what is possible in China and what is not).

@Nefario, some feedback for next time:Have them make a business plan in advance, so that they know what they will be selling/doing to make money. Now, they are mostly asking the market to come up with ideas of what their business should be. In the big "western" world this would look stupid and they would fail. Second, because the market/people are different in their mind set, let them do some background research about "western" people. Even people from the US, Canada and Europe have differences in the way how they do business. Part of their business plan would be to make a website and have it hosted (and let them know that they could use some of their initial capital to rent web space).Having ~18 people per company (which imho is a lot for a starting company) they should be able to do a lot more than what I see now happening (even having each student spending 1 hour a week, should generate 18 man hours of work).

@Nefario, some feedback for next time:Have them make a business plan in advance, so that they know what they will be selling/doing to make money. Now, they are mostly asking the market to come up with ideas of what their business should be. In the big "western" world this would look stupid and they would fail. ...

Actually, a company that lets the customer come up with what they want to pay for doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Eventually they would specialize untill growing again adding more people to other things, but from the start they would already have a market without even having to experiment with selling different things to see what people would pay for.

(I dont always get new reply notifications, pls send a pm when you think it has happened)

Wanna gimme some BTC/BCH for any or no reason? 1FmvtS66LFh6ycrXDwKRQTexGJw4UWiqDX

The more you believe in Bitcoin, and the more you show you do to other people, the faster the real value will soar!

@Nefario, some feedback for next time:Have them make a business plan in advance, so that they know what they will be selling/doing to make money. Now, they are mostly asking the market to come up with ideas of what their business should be. In the big "western" world this would look stupid and they would fail. ...

Actually, a company that lets the customer come up with what they want to pay for doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Eventually they would specialize untill growing again adding more people to other things, but from the start they would already have a market without even having to experiment with selling different things to see what people would pay for.

Not every person can do everything. If they would try it would be very inefficient and it would only cost the company money. It is far better to decide a direction that the company follows (a core business stated in the business plan) and hires qualified people needed to do the work properly. Second, in most markets people look for companies that can fill their wishes and needs. If a company says they do everything, I would not trust them being able to fill the needs. I expect a bakery to have more knowledge about bread than the local bike shop.

Nefario, please don't take it wrong, but what about you teach them english as you are supposed to do, instead of forcing them to sell themselves on the web for bitcoins?

Hahahaha, you make me sound like a digital pimp.

The point of the exercise is to use their English to complete a task, it's called task orientated learning, learning by doing. You can see how poor their English is, this is because they focus on passing tests. So they are good at passing tests, but can't use their English to communicate even basic things.

This forces them to USE English, which as you can see most of them have never done.

Alright, so I have sent messages to most of the students who have been posting on the forum the last couple of days(just using the forum, I will send a general email tomorrow) thelling them to stop for the moment.

I apologise for the anoyance, but a lot of that is due to their poor English and pure lazyness. One thing for certain is that we can expect a lot of begging like activity such as this to happen once there is a significant takeup of bitcoin.

I'm going to have the students learn from what has happened here over the last couple of days. Get them to move away from begging and actually offer something.

Some good ideas that have come up is:Chinese cook bookChinese music selection(something decent and not just a few songs)Chinese lessons.I will have them go away and work on those for one or two weeks and come back with an actual decent product.

Other obvious ones are the translation services(although I would be careful with these, anything translated into Chinese should have the original English put through Google translate and compare the two, reject if both are the same, i.e. they used google translate, this is lazy and they should not be paid)

A clever one I think was offering photoshop services. OK most people on the bitcoin forums are quite technical but not evervyone can have PS skills. Its not one I had thought of.

And the jokes, This is something that had not crossed my mind, I'll have them put together a joke book with Chinese style jokes.

Thank you everyone for your patience, the next round (in a couple of weeks) with the improved products or services I think will actually make the forum a more vibrant place.

And finally, once this has all finished I will make as much information about the whole project available for anyone interested to have a look at. Its certainly something I will try next academic year in more formalised manner.

I think it would be wise to guide them a bit more before unleashing them onto the forum. I think that is where this lacked. Also have them focus on one thing and have them do that properly. I still hope to get my time-lapse video of a germinating seed. I had some other good ideas for them, but nobody offered anything related close enough to ask for it (the time lapse was because someone offered a stop-motion video, which is quite related in the way to make it).

I guess not only the students learned a lot from this (you should reflect with them in class, what went right, what went wrong), but also you as a teacher should have learned a lot from this.

A temporary subforum with Nefario as a local moderator would be nice. You should ask Sirius about it.

They are offering real goods and services! They should not be treated differently because they're Nefario's students. When you're trying to learn how to operate business, you want to be exposed to the real world economy with real competition as much as possible.

They are offering real goods and services! They should not be treated differently because they're Nefario's students. When you're trying to learn how to operate business, you want to be exposed to the real world economy with real competition as much as possible.

They shouldn't be forced into a subforum, but it would give Nefario more control over their posts.

In the future, I may delete posts that are almost impossible to understand, especially if the title of the topic is misleading.

Btw, if they've trained to do good on English tests even when their English sucks, don't you think it's time to redesign the tests?

Isnt that the problem with tests in general? that students can study specifically to pass them?

And besides, Chinese students are such cheaters, even when they're not being graded they cheat. So it's hard to cheat with bitcoins.

I suppose you could make me a temporary mod, and I'll go through market getting all the posts and putting them into Chinese market. In the future though, when the students come back(1-2 weeks) they should be much less....spammy.

Just a tip: if they consistently apply proper spacing and capitalisation, then their perceived language skills would sky-rocket. It's a small thing that takes 20 mins to learn.

- Spaces after ALL punctuation.- No spaces before.- Initial capitals after .?!- No more than one space.- Don't mix ...,.,., and only ever use a single .- Don't use Chinese idioms in English.- Titles should follow the Wikipedia style guide: Initial capital with Names capitalised. (it's the easiest to remember and use IMO)- 1 idea per paragraph. Paragraphs should be around 3-6 sentences.